No one expects the Vortex of Chaos. It's ice on the sidewalk three days before Christmas, the driver who knocks the door off your SUV, the surgery that dims your voice, the cancer treatments that leave your brain muddled for months. But like the accretion ring surrounding a black hole, the Vortex of Chaos is also the neon sign that says you're still in business, that you haven't given up, that you're not willing to take it lying down.
Chaos is Life.

Montag, Mai 26, 2008

Memorial Day

We settled on the house we live in after much searching, partly because we heard a piper playing in the cemetery across the street. Now houses have grown up between us and the resting place of many dead, but pipers still play there in their memory. Our daughter is among them.

Some of the pipers are great-great-grandchildren of Robert Barclay, who had been the Queen's Piper, then came to America and founded the Utah Pipe Band.

Our own Scottish heritage has been difficult trace; we have only the name of a Scottish ancestress who raised Paul's grandfather: Hannah Grahame. Laurel simplified things by marrying into a family of Utah Scots, the Leishmans of Cache Valley.

We know three of the dead who are our near neighbors across the street. One the grandfather of our son-in-law; the other the little child of a friend, his oldest son, little Kyle. The third is Dave Barclay, who taught Laurel and half the pipers in Utah.

P.S. In case you are reading off bloglines, there is a short video of the bagpipers in the actual blog.